Re: Qt becomes Free Software

[David Warnock <david sundayta co uk>]

** Reply to message from James Smith <j-smith@physics.tamu.edu> on Wed, 18 Nov
1998 07:03:46 -0600


> Unfortunately, it's equivalent to the GPL (in general), not the LGPL. 
> Maybe I don't understand how Qt works, but I assume users can have
> dynamic linking with their libraries.  If you read section 6 of their
> license, you see that any program linking with Qt must be open sourced. 
> There goes any commercial support, which IMHO would be nice.
> 
> Section 5 says we can run the non-open source programs, we just can't
> develope them.  This is more restrictive than any GPL or LGPL.

Hang on a minute.

1.  The complaint has been about the QT license and KDE. That is definately
solved.

2. If you want to develop commercial software then you can buy QT Professional
to do so and that will be 100% compatible with QT free. So QT is now suitable
for free software without stopping the company selling QT for co,mmercial
software. This seems perfectly fair to me.

The only thing that might upset some people is that if they develop patches for
QT free then TrollTech can make money by selling them with QT professional.  I
do not have a problem with this but then I am not like to make any such patches.

Dave


David Warnock
Sundayta Ltd